I don't see CUDA as a game changer. Every NLE vendor has got to be working on it or has a death wish. There's more signficant aspects to CS5 that are changing the way the industry works, we've already lost a job because of them. Ppro is still Ppro, lets not forget that. Vegas is still easier to work with in many ways. Some things are better done in Ppro, I'll be the first to admit that but overall I still prefer working in Vegas. Not to say that I don't see both Ppro and Vegas as worth having in the toolkit. I've got one project at the moment involving media that Vegas is having serious grief with. Quick fix, drop it into Ppro that handles is just fine and transcode to something Vegas will handle.

Bob.

"Vegas will never be taken seriously"
Are you speaking for me too?

I don't care if Vegas is taken seriously (and who's to say it isn't) The productions which I create in Vegas are taken seriously and that's all that matters to me.

Ditto, John. My wife and I produce a Telly Award winning music show in HD in Vegas and no one cares that we use Vegas. It works just fine, thank you.

"Vegas will never be taken seriously"

I speak in general. People who shoot video want to start editing as soon as the video is captured into the computer, whether it's by tape or by USB transfer from an AVCHD camera. Most people don't want to wait minutes or hours to convert all the footage to proxy files of any kind to only then start editing. Of course FCP editors do this to some extent, since FCP converts at the same time it's capturing, but at least it doesn't claim to edit AVCHD natively like Vegas does (and it does, but poorly).

And also, at this point in time, for any pro NLE not to use the power of the graphics card to accelerate video, especially when there are several consumer NLEs out there that have been using it for years, it's just sad.

Why would anyone shooting serious video use the AVCHD consumer format? Educate me?

MOST people are producing for the home, Internet, small business, community access, specialty DVD market, etc. As soon as a product exists people want every feature and amenity. That is unreasonable.

Less than broadcast studio production does not equal less than serious. Vegas has a very serious niche and some work flows allow it to be useful for world-class production.

Don't expect Vegas or FCP or pPro to be equal. They are not. They are different. Features will come, others won't. Choose the tool for your job.

Why would anyone shooting serious video use the AVCHD consumer format? Educate me?

Not everybody has the budget for a XDCAM EX or P2 camera, and besides, AVCHD is used an an entry professional format as well, such as the AVCCAM line of Panasonic camcorders.

And anyone can shoot serious video using a $500 AVCHD camera if they know how to use it properly. It may not be perfect, but a $500 in the hands of a skilled videographer can produce better video than a $10,000 one in the hands of someone who doesn't know how to use it.

I have Vegas and CS3 on my comp. I use After Effects and Photo shop out of that The rest of my CS3 sits on the self collecting cob webs. Everything I do is in Vegas and I have had no problems with clients or my preferred NLE Vegas

"I speak in general."

I see.
So you know what the Vegas user base is do you? You can specifically state why 100's of thousands of people spend money on a product that they don't take seriously? You can "speak in general" because you have the pulse on the video editing community that well?

Maybe YOU don't take it seriously and you sure are welcomed to that opinion (it's certainly one that I don't share) but please stop this "speaking in general" trash unless you can back it up with some facts and figures.

Sebaz says, "But regardless of secondary monitor preview, no matter how many great features Vegas has, editors don't always have time to create lower quality proxies to be able to edit properly, especially in multicam, which is impossible to do in Vegas with AVCHD footage, at least not in real time."

I am editing AVCHD with 2 cams with Vegas and Infiniticam, I use 'Preview Full', using a second monitor and have a very good CLEAR display and am getting real time!

Vegas 9d 64 bit.

If you want to do serious video editing then get or build a system designed for editing!

Too many people are trying to edit on sub-par systems and think they should get performance that is up to par. FORGET IT!!! Not going to happen!!!

You read the forums for ANY NLE and the ones that have the most problems are on sub-par systems!

Don't expect a spoon to do the job of a bull-dozer!

My system:

Three hard drives.
One for boot
One for data
One for video

Operating System
Platform: Windows 7
Version: 6.01.7600
Language: English
System locale: English
User locale: English

Processor
Class: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
Identifier: GenuineIntel
Number of processors: 8
MMX available: Yes
SSE available: Yes
SSE2 available: Yes
SSE3 available: Yes
SSSE3 available: Yes
SSE4.1 available: Yes
SSE4.2 available: Yes

Display
Primary: 1680x1050x32

Memory
Physical memory: 6,135.1 MB
Paging memory available: 12,268.4 MB

I've spent several days with Premiere Pro CS5 and the Cuda ( GTX 285 ).

The Mercury engine is a *very* nice thing of course. Who doesn't like smooth playback. Playing back stuff smoothly and seeing dissolves, 3D motion, text etc. all butter smooth is great.

CS5 played back AVCHD footage from my Canon 5D2 really smooth too.

However...
CS5 didn't scrub AVCHD very smoothly. So editing this kind of footage directly still isn't possible I think.
I feel a lot more creative with Vegas.
It's a lot more fun in Vegas.
Doing the same stuff in CS5 and Vegas, Vegas seems a lot quicker for me.
Audio work in Vegas is superior to CS5 and superior to Avid too.

I really believe that SCS will find ways of improving video preview and I intend to stick with Vegas and hopefully see some variant of GPU solution coming up soon.

Vegas is unique in the way you can quickly interact and play and have control over things. CS5's mercury is impressive but I have found out that there's a lot more to video editing...


Lars

Welcome back, and thanks for sharing your impressions after switching to CS5 for a while.

If you want to do serious video editing then get or build a system designed for editing!

This has been discussed endlessly, but here we go again. If I could not play my AVCHD footage at all in my computer, whether with a regular player or with another NLE, then definitely I would agree with you in that my computer is underpowered for this kind of task. But my AVCHD footage plays great both with players and with Edius Neo Booster, and also with a consumer NLE like PowerDirector.

Not only this, but while editing in Vegas I can see that this playback stutter that occurs only at times, and not even always in the same portion of the footage. Just yesterday I was editing a simple cuts project and it was playing fine, but then it got to a point where it started choking. I loaded Task Manager and Vegas was using about 4 GB of RAM, half of what I have installed. This was with RAM Preview set to 0, by the way. No other programs were open, except for background processes, and I do my best to keep as little as possible of those.

So I closed Vegas and opened it again, after checking in Task Manager that the used RAM had gone down to about 1.5 GB. This time I started playing from the beginning of the timeline and it played in the real time all the way through, even with the Color Corrector filter applied to several events. It was only ten minutes long, but still, it didn't choke at all. That tells me that it's not that AVCHD is such a difficult format for my computer, it's just that Vegas is not well coded to handle it as best as it could.

Perhaps if I built a system with 8 core Xeon CPUs and 24 GB of RAM Vegas would work smoothly, but that's my point, there are other NLEs that are handling this format perfectly well with my Q6700 CPU and 8 GB of RAM, then why Vegas isn't?

Now, about the title of this thread, even if Premiere CS5 offers playback in real time, I would still prefer editing in Vegas for anything that is not a simple cuts only project, because the Vegas' interface is far better to my preference.

LarsHD, Im with you. I did my share on here of whining bout Vegas over the years. So I got a mac and FCP suite. Yikes my workflow ground to a halt, so after months of trying my mac became an expensive ippod sync. Nice! but I was already spoiled by Vegas. Now Ive got Production premium cs4 and tried 5. All I can say is I love after effects and Photoshop. nothing worse while editing then to wait 30 minutes of render to test your timing, vegas is the only one that lets you do that. People shouldnt complain about playback, play it in premiere then, but do your edits in Vegas. You dont know what you got till it aint there. then theirspp and fcp picky file compatibility...dont get me started. But there are some nice features of the others I guess.
Steven

I fear wer're looking at this the wrong way. Sure comparing Vegas to Ppro you could very easily choose Vegas, even Adobe don't have much difficulty admitting that. That's irrelevant really.

I sat in a large conference centre with around 800 people at the CS5 roadshow. Only 30% of them were video people. The rest were print and web. CS5 has many great features for those guys and they get Ppro and AE in the bundles they buy. Print and web is even more tightly integrated. Flash Catalyst is in the box too. Today I find a lot of stills / graphics guys shooting video for clients. They've got the tools to edit that footage, they've got the tools to put it onto the web and build a nice website.

The challenge for us is going to be staying relevant. Even the wedding market seems to be changing. The guy who charges big bucks to take the photos with a 1/5D can now shoot the video as well and he's probably already got Ppro and AE. The agencies that do it inhouse can now do the whole show, print, web, cinema. Adobe have seen this coming for a long time. Apple might have missed the boat, they sure need to start playing nice with Adobe and Google.

Bob.

Out of over a dozen of post house i visited in the past year (as a shooter helping to set-up a post work flow for projects i was shooting) NO ONE is using Vegas of PPro. Period. There is no if or buts. You can wishfully think what you want and by any means use whatever you want to edit your projects but the truth is that only Avid and FCP are the industry standards.

I just secured a new client that I'm shooting some doc. footage for. They expressed interest in me doing some of the editing but it needs to be Final Cut because that's what they use and they need to be able to edit the project as well. For this reason I may also learn and use Final Cut as well. Still prefer Vegas but it seems that learing FC and/or AVID is a good idea.

Why ask what brand of hammer the carpenter uses to build your house? Edit in Vegas and deliver uncompressed MOV. The FCP editor won't know the difference.

"Most people don't want to wait minutes or hours to convert all the footage to proxy files of any kind to only then start editing. Of course FCP editors do this to some extent, since FCP converts at the same time it's capturing, but at least it doesn't claim to edit AVCHD natively like Vegas does (and it does, but poorly)."

Of course Avid editors have to do this ALWAYS.

AVCHD is a HIGHLY compressed consumer format and decompressing it for real-time display is very processor intensive. I don't think I've ever heard of any GPU support for AVCHD.

Strange that the FCP and PP fans complain that Vegas is not a professional product because it stutters with a CONSUMER format.

How can AVCHD be called consumer? There are professional camcorders out there shooting AVCHD
h.264 h.262 they are all different flavors of mpeg anyway

SERIOUS can also mean staid or even dull. Professional has to do with mental approach, fortitude and ability; these have to do with PEOPLE behind the camera or NLE
use what you have and can afford .You don’t need big bucks to be professional

The attitude of “Industry norm” has robbed many of there creative flexibility and have become very serious indeed.

"The FCP editor won't know the difference."

They just might if they ask for the project files :)

If you send media on a HD, don't sent them a NTFS formatted disk. Get a copy of Macdrive so you can send them HFS disks.

Bob.